Print 101 Tips to Get You To Pro Design Status (in v3.1)

[forfear]

I have just released our first single-sourced print and HTML help docs into the ecosystem (120 pages, indexed, TOC, cover page, copyrights page). Am very glad to share my best practices after much experimentation and cross referencing the Flare Help System and the Flare printable Getting Started Guide to see what its capable of. I've still got more doc projects to rein in that must be compatible for both HTML Help and Print Output into the Flare ecosystem. Here it is, in brief points, without my long waffling about

I hope this list will save you a lot of time, make you popular, help you to influence your friends and family and make youlots of money. haha

Most of the information contained below, is, I believe mostly one of its kind (for Flare), you won't find some of these guidelines or best practices in the Help system on in any of the the included printed books, since you're left to establish your own practices. Some of it is common sense project management, standards oriented compliance experience and best practices applicable to any tool.

This is what I used and practiced. (print outputs)
1. Establish naming guidelines for key project items (Variable sets, Targets, Skins, Masterpages, TOCs)
2. Look in Flare help on 'Running H/F' in the help system. (similar to Styleref Fields in Word)
3. For print, two Print Master pages is all you need (one for all your Print Pages, another for Print Chapters, for that professional finish)
4. Create a /PrintAssets folder in /Resources for the 3 Print only topics (PrintCover,PrintTOC,PrintIndex). Set Print Conditions on them.
5. Open the stylesheet, and set the medium to 'print' before you start fooling around with styles.
6. To set a consistent default fontface for all your topics and tables, you will need to specify the same font face and size for each of the following styles:
body
li
td
th
p
a (pseudoclass), link and visted; set to black, text-decoration to none.
7. In Targets, explore the Print Outputs tab, particularly on the TOC heading injection settings, TOC heading depth.
8. Keep headers and footers almost minimalist (don't flood it with too much data or fancy fonts)
9. Establish a PrintTOC structure
PrintCover
PrintTOC
---Your content chapters
PrintIndex
10. In PrintCover
- Use the H1.Title and H1.Subtitle instead of creating new styles.
(use styles that have already been defined for your project)
11. Establish a Table_Basic style and use the Table Header columns. Apply it consistently to all tables you have in your project.
12. Start clean, finish clean.
Clean the project again, looking for project items that don't fit your naming guidelines, or unused test items.
A cleaner consistent project structure is always easier to maintain by anyone.
13. If you're not sure what a style item is doing in your project, delete it. You can rebuild it later. If its important, Flare will recreate it.
14. Keep your stylesheets clean with things you understand.
15. Install the Analyzer trial, run it for a bit. Don't fix everything it recommends. Evaluate the suggestions first, THEN fix the relevant ones ONLY.
16. Insert Cross-References liberally like magic dust. Not hyperlinks when you can.
17. Tools > Update Cross-References (You must use this! )
18. Customize the XREF style for 'print' medium. In the Advanced Style Sheet Editor, under Unclassified group, see mc-format. Set to [ "{para}" on page {page} ]
19. Baseline, stablize and document your project settings into a list, chuck it into your CVS or Sharepoint repositories and communicate it.

That's it...5 weeks of hard learning, all to discover and perfect the fine arts of print publishing, and producing world class electronic and printed documentation with Flare.

Please reply if this has helped you or if you wanna add to this list. no site on the internet has this yet.

Once you've nailed this down, perfect your skills.
Go commercial. Go to http://www.apple.com, download any of their print pdf user's guides, for example the IPOD User's Guide, and recreat a few topics in Flare, in style and appearance. I think Flare is pretty much up to it.

For long term, establish your organizational style guide, google up MHRA Style Guide, strip the heck out of it and simplify it to a one page sheet. Communicate it to your staff, engage them, sell it, sit back, and take back control of your organizational documentation.

[Techno]

A nice check list - thank you!

You wouldn't consider writing "Flare - Printed Documentation for the complete Dork" would you? Put me down for the first copy please?

Or does anyone know if something similar has been published yet? I'm continually being tripped up by the stupidest things - even changing paper size from US Letter to European A4 can throw things out for me. And trying to get a document suitable for Duplex (double-sided) printing just isn't playing the game for me. It wouldn't be half so bad if I could even map Flare Styles to Word Styles and/or to a Word Template!

[forfear]

Now my documents are finally distributed, now is the time i get a chance to sit back and fix 'bugs' in my stylesheet.

As one of the forum posts in the Flare Styles related forums mention...."It's all quite interesting if you ask me all this discussions about absolute and relative, like a religion, between right and wrong."

anyway, back to the heart of the matter

For print mediums, the fonts should be specified in ABSOLUTE terms. For online and HTML help outputs, RELATIVE is what you want.

This piqued my interest, because the The TechWhirlers mailing list forum this morning had a discussion about the best font size to set, arial 10pt, vs Times 12pt.

How to do it?
My current HTML Help stylesheet, (medium:default) has all its font sizes specified in absolute terms i.e.
for each and every individual classes such as p, body, td,th, li, h1 to h6
for example,
Verdana
8pt

This is NOT good practice, as i discovered. This is what you want to do to clean up your style.

Remove all font-size specification in all the classes.
Set all to 'default' to clear it.

1. Open the body class
and set the font-size to 100%.
Don't change the body class just yet.
2. For each style class mentioned above, specify the font-size specs in % terms, as necessary.
h1 {font-size:140%;} , etc etc.

Before you pat yourself on the back, think the fonts are all too big ?
1. Open the Body class and set the size to a smaller percentage, i.e 90%

Everything else will scale down. You're done.

Now you've made your online help more accessible with resizable typefaces regardless of age group. and saved yourself a day for the park

[LTinker68]

Now you've made your online help more accessible with resizable typefaces regardless of age group. and saved yourself a day for the park

I should point out it's not quite as easy as forfear mentions. I use relative fonts for all the online stuff, but you have to play with them a lot initially to make sure you account for all tags. The reason is because of the whole "cascading" part of the cascading stylesheets. Whereas a <li> tag set to 90% (using forfear's example) is fine if the <li> tag is one level inside the <body>, you'll discover a problem if you put the <li> tag inside a <p>, for instance (well, it would be <p><ol><li>, but you get the point).

The reason is because relative sizing is based on the parent tag, not the body tag. If you're one level in from the body tag then the parent tag is the body tag, but if you're another level in, then the parent tag is the tag one level up from the tag you're in. So in my example, the <p> tag is the parent tag of the <li> tag. If the <p> tag is already at 90%, then the <li> tag will display at 90% of that 90%, because it's displaying at 90% of its parent, which is already reduced. So the <li> tag, in this example, would be displaying the text at approximately 81% the size of the <body> tag, instead of the 90% originally intended.

So if you use relative sizing in online help (I use ems, not %), then be prepared to set up some complex selectors. In this example, the stylesheet code would show the following:

Code: Select all

body {font-size: 100%}
p, li {font-size: 90%}
p * li {font-size: 90%}

The first line is the body declaration. The second line is saying that both the p and li tags should be at 90% size, and the third tag is saying that if a li tag is inside another tag (most like ol or ul) that's contained inside a p tag, then the font size should be 90% (of the body tag).

[NorthEast]

I should point out it's not quite as easy as forfear mentions.

Yep, 200% harder in relative terms, or 'tricky' in absolute terms.

(I tried it a while back and just gave up.)

[forfear]

I completely understand what you mean, but i am glad to say, that so far i think i may have cracked it.


My suggestion. Clear any font-size settings in your li tags. set them to default - which means none..

Body
- li
- p
- td
- th
- h1
- h2

etc..

So in effect, with the cascading effect, if I were to set only font-size in the body tag. all other classes would inherit the same body size setting.
So if all the fonts are a bit too big or tool small, i would adjust the body font-size setting only.

So if i wanted the Table headers (th) to be a larger font i would set the font-size to 105%. and adjust accordingly
The same goes...
If the relative sizes between H1 and h2 seem a bit too close, ie. they look almost the same size, what i would do is set font size as follows

Code: Select all

h1 {font-size:180%}
h2 {font-size:130%}

In order words, I increase the 'difference' in size between h1 and h2. I use relative values to set the relative size differences...As einstein would say its all relative to your point of reference ..i.e the body tag.


On the issue of nested tags
p , li
That's a moot point to consider. i used to have this problem wheere specified relative sizes in the ol and li and ul tags. making things all terribly confusing. that's why i've forced myself not to overspecify the font-size settings if possible. I imagine p and body tags and all li tags are usually set to the same size.


i hope this clears up the way for more experimentation and i hope it is clearer. I understand all your pain and frustration, because i have had the same experience even in RoboHelp x5. i just happened to stumble on this solution.

PS. by the way i have read before that we are actually encouraged to use 'EMs' actually, don't know why but its a good practice.

[NorthEast]

I might have another try then. After all, Einstein managed it!

[helen]

Hmm, interesting - a Friday job I think! Thanks for the detailed instructions, I'm going to give this a whirl on Friday - I'll report back.

[kristil]

[quote="forfear"]18. Customize the XREF style for 'print' medium. In the Advanced Style Sheet Editor, under Unclassified group, see mc-format. Set to [ "{para}" on page {page} ]

Our team is having some difficulty with the formatting of our print cross-references. We want a format much like what you described, and we're using this: {para}{i}(see page {page}){/i}

It looks the way we want it: Topic(see page 1)

But the hyperlink doesn't work. And so far I can't figure out how to get a space between the 'hyperlink' and the parenthesis that isn't underlined.

How do I tell the blue underlined {para} to be a hyperlink?

Thanks!!
Kristi

[forfear]

They don't become hyperlinks if you are printing from Word 2003 to a PDF Printer, without Adobe Acrobat (the paid version). You need an Adobe Distiller to convert hyperlinks to clickable links in PDF.
Another way to get clickable links is
If you have Word 2007 with the Word 2007 Save to PDF plugin, the hyperlinks and xrefs (cross-references) will become links...i have been told. (you can download it for free from Microsoft so long as you use a valid Word 2007)

[forfear]

....And so far I can't figure out how to get a space between the 'hyperlink' and the parenthesis that isn't underlined.

How do I tell the blue underlined {para} to be a hyperlink?

Open the stylesheet and edit the cross-reference mc-format as shown.

CrosRef01.png

add a space.

CrosRef7-13-2008.png

TIP: If you want to click the ' blue underlined text' in Word, press the CTRL key + click the link.

[kristil]

Good morning.

Regarding my hyperlink issue with xref for print, I am building a Word 2003 target, then using Acrobat to PDF. But the links aren't working in the Word target. (My Word defaults are set to where I only have to click the hyperlinks. But I did try Ctrl+clicking just for the heck of it.)

Per the recommendation above, I tried this format: "{para}" (see page {page})

This was the result:

xref_issue.gif

Disregarding for the moment that I want "(see page #)" to be black and italicized (I know how to do that), the hyperlink does not work. The paragraph it points to is definitely in the target, too.
Plus, the space between the para text and the parenthesis is underlined. :/

[kristil]

Update: I ended up emailing this to tech support, and it turns out that xrefs don't create hyperlinks in Word targets. I was expecting to replace many of my hyperlinks with xrefs, but for now that won't work. But there is a feature request in for this.

[forfear]

This post will need to get updated for Flare 4. there are substantial changes and improvements with page layouts...i think i need a rethink of some of the principles in here. Some don't work so well and some like short line elimination are really important to have for paragraphs.

[LTinker68]

I changed the title to indicate that the tips relate to v3.1. Forfear, if you want to compile the same type of tips for v4, then start a new thread and indicate that it's for v4.

[forfear]

I changed the title to indicate that the tips relate to v3.1. Forfear, if you want to compile the same type of tips for v4, then start a new thread and indicate that it's for v4.

Thanks Lisa...will do that!